What is Cloud Website Hosting?

Getting Started Plan

What is cloud website hosting in reality? The term 'cloud' appears to be quite trendy in today's IT, Internet and hosting terms. Still, just a select few actually can say what cloud hosting is. Probably it is a clever idea to educate yourself about cloud website hosting services. To render a very lengthy tale concise, we will first reveal to you what cloud hosting is not.

1. Cloud Website Hosting is Not Confined to a Remote Disk Storage Solely.

1. Offering a remote data storage service, which comprises one single disk storage tool for all clients, does not convert any given web hosting distributor into a real cloud website hosting firm.

The cPanel web hosting firms call the ability to furnish remote file storage solutions a cloud website hosting solution. Up until now there is nothing bad about the cloud designation, but... we are discussing web hosting solutions, not remote file storage services for private or business needs. There's constantly one "but", isn't there? It's not enough to dub a shared hosting service, based on a single-server web hosting platform, just like cPanel, a "cloud website hosting" solution. That's because the remaining constituents of the whole hosting platform must be functioning in precisely the same manner - this does not apply only to the remote disk storage. The remaining services entailed in the entire hosting process also must be remote, separated and "clouded". And that's extremely hard. A very small number of hosting vendors can really achieve it.

To dub a web hosting service a "cloud website hosting" one demands a lot more than delivering just remote disk storage mounts (or maybe servers). The e-mail server(s) must be dedicated solely to the electronic mail associated services. Carrying out nothing else than these given tasks. There might be only one single or perhaps an entire stack of email servers, depending on the total server load generated. To have an actual cloud website hosting solution, the remote database servers should be functioning as one, irrespective of their actual number. Executing nothing else. The same is valid for the clients' CPs, the File Transfer Protocol, and so on.

3. There are Cloud Domain Name Servers (DNSs) too.

The DNSs (Domain Name Servers) of a true cloud website hosting company will support numerous server farm sites on different continents.

Here's an illustration of a Domain Name Server of a true cloud website hosting firm:

dns1.westgatehosting.com

dns2.westgatehosting.com

If such a DNS is supplied by your web hosting plans provider, it's not a guarantee that there is a cloud hosting environment in use, but you can absolutely be confident when you notice a DNS like the one below:

dns658.hostgator.com

dns659.hostgator.com

that there isn't any cloud web hosting service. This type of Domain Name Server simply manifests that the hosting environment in use is one-server based. Perhaps it's cPanel. cPanel is a single-server web hosting platform and holds a 98+ percent market share. In cPanel's case, a single physical machine handles all hosting services (web, email, DNS, databases, FTP, CP(s), web files, etc.).

So, a cloud website hosting service is not confined exclusively to a remote disk storage service, as numerous hosting providers wish it was. Unluckily for them, if that was the case, most of the file hosting corporations would have been classified as cloud hosting ones a long time ago! They are not referred to as such, as they simply offer file hosting solutions, not cloud web hosting solutions. The file web hosting platform appears really very simple, in comparison with the web hosting platform. The remote file storage platform is not a cloud hosting platform. It cannot be, as it's simply one small fraction of the entire cloud web hosting platform. There's plenty more to be encountered in the cloud web hosting platform: the Control Panel cloud, the database clouds (MySQL, PostgreSQL), the DNS cloud, the File Transfer Protocol cloud, the email cloud and... in the upcoming future, maybe a few new clouds we presently are not informed about will appear out of the blue.